Christine Flowers: Signs of Jim Crow still pervade our minds

My mother and father lived in Baltimore during 1960-1961. Besides breathing the same air as Johnny Unitas and the legendary Colts (the real ones, before they galloped off to Indianapolis,) they had a baby (me), Dad got his diploma from the University of Maryland, and Mom learned a few lessons in racism.

Coming from a close-knit Italian neighborhood in West Philadelphia, Lucy Fusco Flowers had never been on the front lines of the civil rights struggle. The City of Brotherly Love was not exactly a bastion of tolerance (and there were tensions between white ethnic groups), but you didn’t see any hoses being aimed or churches being firebombed.

But when Mom spent that season in Baltimore, the scales fell from her beautiful brown eyes. She recalled that one day, while taking a walk during a lunch break from her job as a bank teller, she saw something that would have been unthinkable in Philly: Two water fountains: one for “Whites” and one for “Coloreds.”

Baltimore was just barely below the Mason-Dixon line, so it’s not surprising that at the dawn of the 1960s there would still be signs of Jim Crow. And this is not to say that my birthplace, aptly named Charm City because of its sunny people and its southern touch, was a bastion of racism.

It was, in fact, more tolerant than many of the nation’s larger metropolises. But the fact that a white woman could still drink at her own reserved water fountain in the light of day was indicative of the bigotry that was worn, like a badge of normalcy, in certain places.

Several years later, as a newly minted attorney, my father traveled down to Hattiesburg, Miss., with a group called Lawyers United for Civil Rights, and spent a summer registering black voters. I’ve written on several prior occasions about what happened to him in that steamy southern town, including the fact that he had a run in with the Ku Klux Klan. He was also called, to his face, “white n——” and “n—— lover.” This was one year before Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis.

So both Mom and Dad had experiences with overt racism, although I think my father got the more brutal lesson. Still, these two Yankees knew that the perceived calm and tolerance of their native Philadelphia was illusory.

Sometimes I think southerners were more honest about their feelings. While no one should sanction the type of institutional inequality that flourished until the Civil Rights Act and Brown v. Board of Education, there is something to be said about knowing your enemies. Mom could have chosen to avoid drinking from her “reserved” fountain if she’d wanted to. Dad didn’t have to guess at who, exactly, wanted him dead.

Up here, in the rarified and civilized northern climes, they didn’t have that luxury. Or, I should say, blacks didn’t. While on the surface it appeared that things were going fairly smoothly (as long as people stayed in their own pockets and kept to their own kind), the racial riots that pockmarked the landscape of the Jim Crow South were much more rare north of the Mason-Dixon. We practiced a kind of social self-segregation.

In many ways, we still do. While that’s not exactly desirable, you simply cannot legislate acceptance and tolerance. You can make sure that everyone has equal opportunities and that skin color will not force you into a corner. On the other hand, you cannot erase bigotry from the heart, regardless of whether it beats in a white, black, brown or yellow chest.

We all learned that this week, with the release of text messages exchanged between two school officials in Coatesville. Without getting into the details of the incident, suffice it to say that some very ugly language was used to describe minorities and women by athletic director Jim Donato and Superintendent Richard Como. Most of the texts cannot be reprinted in totality because of their vile nature, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that these two men slept through Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. There is no defense for their obvious bigotry.

The real problem is the insidious nature of their disordered view of the world, and of their fellow Pennsylvanians. Unlike Bull Connor and card-carrying members of the KKK (including some notable Democrats like Justice Hugo Black and Sen. Robert Byrd,) Donato and Como were able to hide their racism behind benign, hale-fellow-well-met masks. The kids that they coached and the students that they mentored probably had no idea until faced with the devastating proof that these men thought they were subhuman.

In Baltimore and Mississippi, at least they had the good grace to announce their hatred.

We in the North have always had a superiority complex about a lot of things, including winning the Civil War, imposing reconstruction on a recalcitrant South, sticking up our noses at the “good ol’ boys” who waive the Confederate flag and pushing for remedial legislation. That smugness is actually unearned, when you consider that people like Donato and Como (who I am embarrassed to say share my Italian DNA) are not atypical. Go to any gathering where there are few faces darker than caramel and it’s not unlikely that you’ll hear some racist talk. We just don’t shout it from the rafters.

This is not to say that progress has not been made. It has, and it has been a take-no-prisoners campaign. Sometimes, there are unfair casualties, such as the people who were called bigots because they supported the Trayvon Martin verdict, those who think that affirmative action is no longer necessary, the people who essentially tarred and feathered Paula Deen or those conservative people of color who are regularly called “Uncle Tom” and “Aunt Jemima.”

That is another sort of racism altogether.

But what happened in Coatesville this month is a sad reminder that while we can reconfigure society in an image of fairness through laws and education, those signs on the Baltimore water fountains still exist, invisibly, in our minds.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Sunday. Email her at cflowers1961@gmail.com.